I prefer to set my crime novels in the past, not for the reasons usually given – the lack of smart phones and the internet and the threats such things pose to a plot based around secrets and lies – but because the extra distance of a few expired decades makes it easier, in my opinion, to write playfully about a subject as bleak as murder. And Ink Ribbon Red is a book that’s all about having fun with murder: its six characters spend a wet weekend imagining one another’s deaths, as part of a game they’re playing to pass the time.
It’s also a book that asks the reader to question what is real and what is not. Each time a murder takes place, two possibilities present themselves: has this been caused by the game, and the arguments that it has brought about, or is it part of the game itself? Has it really happened? The time period in which the novel takes place helps heighten this sense of mystery, because everything feels less real when it’s happening in the past.
But the book was always intended to be broadly contemporary, inspired by a number of recent novels that feature groups of people in remote locations (The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley, Sleep by C.L. Taylor, An Unwanted Guest by Shari Lapena – all excellent), so I set it during the most recent year that nonetheless feels definitively like part of the past: the end of the last millennium, 1999.
And yes, just writing that makes me feel old – but crime fiction can’t shy away from these difficult truths. That was the year I turned sixteen. It was a world of payphones and Polaroid photographs, styrofoam coffee cups and cars without airbags. It was also, coincidentally, the year that I became a reader of crime fiction, via the TV programme Jonathan Creek – then onto its third series – and an interview in the Radio Times with its creator, David Renwick, in which he listed his main influences: G.K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr.
Chesterton led me, in turn, to the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges – one of his inheritors – and a short story collection called Fictions. It may be that everything you encounter at sixteen feels influential, but even so, Borges and his Fictions changed my idea of what literature can be. Several of its stories focus on fictional authors, giving wry overviews of their works – wild, impossible books, described as if they were real – including an epic novel that doubles as a labyrinth, a murder mystery that changes its meaning with its final line, and a novel that presents three different versions of the night before a significant event, followed by three different versions of the nights before each of those nights, and so on. I spent a lot of time, when I was young and had time to spare, wondering what those impossible novels would look like if somebody actually tried to sit down and write them.
And that leads me back to Ink Ribbon Red.
My first novel, Eight Detectives, featured seven crime stories woven into a larger narrative. It was a few months after that book came out, while discussing the possibility of a TV adaptation (that unfortunately never happened – or hasn’t happened yet) and the various tricks you could play on the audience using stories-within-stories, that the concept for Ink Ribbon Red occurred to me: a novel in which the central mystery derives from the reader’s inability to tell the difference between the story and stories-within-the-story. Murders take place, but are they real? Or are they fictions within the fiction?
The plot seemed impossible. But I went back to those Fictions of Borges that I’d loved as a sixteen-year-old, and the many hours that I’d spent thinking about how to write them, and felt inspired to give it a go. Eventually, that idea morphed into Ink Ribbon Red. So that is another reason I chose to set the novel in 1999. Because that was – in some abstract sense that is probably cheating – the year that I started work on it.
